Last night I posted on my author page on Facebook that I learned how to spell Banana
I was ridiculously excited and overjoyed at yet another word I could spell correctly; I had to share it with everyone I know. This included my work friends, who most do not know that I am Dyslexic. My excited news was laughed at, which is fine but then the questions rolled in.
Co-worker: If you’re dyslexic, do you read words backwards?
Me: I have never read a word backwards my entire life. The letters just look jumbled sometimes.
Co-worker: If you’re dyslexic, how do you write such good emails?
Me: I write it in Microsoft Word and abuse the spell check.
Co-worker: If you didn’t use spell check, how bad is your spelling?
Me: Let me show you!
I started keeping a notebook of all the words I frequently misspell and showed them to my co-workers. I proudly call this notebook:
My Dyslexic Spelling Guide
One co-work remarked: That’s crazy! You almost have all the letters there, they’re just jumbled.
Me: That’s what I said. Or I spell them the way I sound them out. Which is a problem because,
Some sounds, sound the same to me.
And I can’t distinguish the differences.
Awhile back, I had been using my Twitter account for my Dyslexic Spelling Of The Day. I stopped because I couldn’t keep up with all the drama I had going on in my daily life. I planned to get back to it one day with a fresh new take. The deciding factor for returning to Twitter with D.S.O.T.D. was a ten minute in-depth conversation about the spelling for:
Dissection
I did not recognize this word “Dissection,” or knew the meaning of it. I didn’t have a dictionary nearby and I seriously forgot that Google existed. I was trying to explain to my friend how I was a little upset that he would send me a word I didn’t know and he needed to give me definition, because Microsoft Word synonyms didn’t help me understand any better.
I told him I was trying to spell, “The word that you use when cutting up a frog in science class. I can’t spell it.” I spelled what I thought it was two different ways:
Disection / Diesection
Long story short: Dissection was the word I was looking for. I had just never seen it before. And if I have, it is not an word I encounter often enough to recognize.
This episode of spelling madness reignited my want to share these kinds of experiences. So I have decided to restart my D.S.O.T.D with a brand new hashtag.
Here’s the first post of my revitalized Twitter:
Dyslexic Spelling Of The Day:
Deslexic & Dislexic = Dyslexic
#DyslexicSpellingGuide
It’s my reading that’s the issue rather than my spelling. I don’t see letter back to front or words jumbled up. I just see shadows around letters and ‘pixels’ so it make reading really difficult. Words move but the letters don’t. As for writing by hand, it’s m-w and n-u that I write the wrong way around most often.
Love reading about other peoples experiences 🙂
I say this to people all the time, Dyslexia affects each person differently. Thank you for sharing! I also love reading and hearing how this silly learning disability affects others.
I’ll be honest, I see it as much as an ability as a disability. We have to develop different coping strategies that non-dyslexics will never fully appreciate and we have an ability to see things outside the box because of that 🙂
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